A funny thing happened yesterday, when I drove back home to my trailer after a day of doing things. I pulled into the driveway to find that the folks I’m renting from had put up a pride flag on their home.
Being greeted by this simple symbol that this is a place where LGBTQ+ people are respected was quite lovely, and it also took me for a ride.
All of a sudden, it’s standing out to me—all these ways I have real community in my life. I am truly blessed.
I sat there in my car for a minute and asked myself, “if finding acceptance is this easy, why have I been making it so hard?”
I had a (cis/straight/white) coach ask me that question once when I was describing difficult situations I found myself in. “Why do you make it so hard?”
It left me feeling judgmental toward myself about my inability to be more positive. It left me criticizing myself for not being “tougher” in situations that, quite honestly, were beyond this coach’s limited imagination.
When that question came up in my own mind yesterday, I had the experience to recognize the truth: it’s a stupid and misleading question, designed to erase the realities of systemic injustice.
Breaking out of an abusive system of control, manipulation, hierarchy, and shame is hard. And you don’t really know what’s on the other side until you get there … or if there even really is another side to begin with.
You just move in that direction as best you can, and trust that if you don’t get there in this lifetime, you did your part and that’s the best you can do.
I remember learning a few years ago that Tupac’s mom was a member of the Black Panthers, and I went down a rabbit hole reading up on the philosophies and politics that kept such a badass group of freedom fighters showing up for what they believed the way they did.
It was clear that most of them understood that the level of freedom they were fighting for would not be achieved in their lifetimes—that the fruits of their labor would come for future generations, and they knew they themselves would never taste it.
I have an immense amount of respect for that sort of vision and conviction. And I wonder, as they battled their anguish and despair over how their communities were being crushed, how many white people they had asking them, “why do you make it so hard?”
Part of what we’ve been up against is the programmed voice asking that disrespectful question when we are fighting for our lives. Why are you making it hard?
Why can’t you just get with the program like the rest of us?
I’m doing just fine, so therefore, you must have an attitude problem!
The politics and philosophies revealed by this question actually answer the question.
What was hard is that I believed in people who would ask me this question instead of rising up against injustice when I told them about it.
And why things are feeling easier is that I’ve been dropping the idea that those are or ever were my people.
I’ve been losing respect for people who don’t take responsibility for their impact on other peoples’ freedom.
They aren’t the main characters in any story I care about anymore.
I knew letting relationships like this go was going to incur a lot of loss for me, but what struck me most yesterday when I rolled up to the house wasn’t what I have lost. It’s how stable and connected I feel.
The stuff I lost was never actually real. People playing house with paper doll versions of each other, too comfortable in their privilege to participate in the raw and humbling grittiness of our collective reckoning. They’ve chosen their paper doll world and they’ll keep playing in it until it burns up. (Which it will.)
It’s rather pathetic when you really recognize it for what it is.
And yes, it WAS hard—extremely hard—when I was trying to build any semblance of community among them.
But community looks different for me now. I no longer accept “friendship” with people who treat me as a second-class citizen. I don’t respect “leaders” or “authorities” who expect their egos to be stroked. I recognize them to be obstacles to the cause I care about.
I worried that this would put me on the fringe, that I would be ostracized and cut off. And of course, everything I was taught conditioned me to believe I couldn’t make it without my abusers.
But I’m finding the opposite to be true.
I have deeper and more solid friendships than ever before. A richer and more diverse community.
It used to be hard, and now, it is strangely effortless.
That doesn’t mean I was the problem when it was hard.
It just means I finally made it out of the paper doll world. The people who wanted to play house with my likeness can find another toy. They’re the ones on borrowed time.
I walk around on the dirt like all the other human animals.
It’s messy and painful and breathtaking.
And it’s been going on this way the whole time. Even the paper of the paper doll world had to come from real trees.
And when real fire starts burning, it will be one of the most flammable things to go up.
—Adrien